Yesterday, Attorney General Eric Holder announced changes to the Federal policy in prosecuting drug crimes, basically getting Federal prosecutors to charge low-level offenders with less harsh crimes.  This action would essentially bypass the mandatory minimum sentencing rules whose primary accomplishment is to increase the already unsustainable numbers of Americans in prison.  This is a baby step in admitting that we’ve been losing the War on Drugs for a long time:

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced Monday that low-level, nonviolent drug offenders with no ties to gangs or large-scale drug organizations will no longer be charged with offenses that impose severe mandatory sentences.

The new Justice Department policy is part of a comprehensive prison reform package that Holder unveiled in a speech to the American Bar Association in San Francisco. He also introduced a policy to reduce sentences for elderly, nonviolent inmates and find alternatives to prison for nonviolent criminals.

Baby steps, but a good one. Congress should step up and bolster this effort with legislation that gets at resetting the justice scales — judges won’t have their hands tied and prosecutors have to work for their convictions.

“We must face the reality that, as it stands, our system is, in too many ways, broken,” Holder said. “And with an outsized, unnecessarily large prison population, we need to ensure that incarceration is used to punish, to deter and to rehabilitate — not merely to warehouse and to forget.”

The Justice Reinvestment Initiative (or portions of this effort) are being implemented in 17 or 18 states in an effort to reduce incarceration density but also to reduce costs. States have been looking at the large line item that is their prison budget and are looking for ways to reduce that number — including implementing drug courts and increasing treatment opportunities which seem to have some success. The Feds themselves have a $7B budget item for prisons, and that number is only going to increase. The DOJ doesn’t want to become a department that can only afford to manage those they incarcerate. But at bottom, the Justice Reinvestment Initiative wants to be a data driven approach to dealing with crime — understand the contours of the problem, what has historically worked, what has not and start investing in what works.

Any shift in charging offenders would change the incentives of the police departments whose very life blood for the past few decades has been the War on Drugs. But to get there, the politicians who keep selling Tough on Crime rhetoric need to start telling constituents that the old policies cost too much and deliver too little. Which is to say that you trust what Holder had to say yesterday. He and President Obama waved their hands at the medical marijuana initiatives, saying that they had other things to worry about. Unfortunately, they misled a bunch of folks — and Federal officials are raiding and trying to shut down medical marijuana shops all over the West.

Th nation’s Chief Law Enforcement Officer picking up some of what some states are beginning to come to grips with — that the War On Drugs failed to stop any drugs, has been hugely disruptive of communities and costs too much — is a step in the right direction. And it is incredibly important to start taking more steps to rein in the War on Drugs.